Winning is a good deodorant

Thank you, John Madden, for the above quote from the Cowboys/Panthers game tonight.

Another lazy Saturday

My gosh. This has been, quite possibly, the slowest shift I've ever had. I've been here for 5 hours and had four people come in, one of whom was Ben, another thought we sold clothes for some reason, and a couple who walked in, looked around for 2 minutes, and walked out. Simply stunning.

And, while I type this, I've had two more couples come in, bringing my total to 8. Just when I thought I could whine for awhile, things get better. And, I'm winning at SimGolf, so life is good.

It's happening. Slowly.

I'm switching up the format, I think I'm pretty close. Trying to get rid of the blue line along the sidebar, let me know if you don't see it. I'm also gonna try and find a better picture for the sidebar. Any other suggestion on things that need to change or could look better, let me know!

Oh, gravity, why can't we seem to keep it together?

I am now in Blogger Beta. I’m hoping this doesn’t make too much of a difference, but it will let me label stuff and eventually do other cool things too, so I figured I should just go for it.

Facebook added a “share” feature today, which I’m not exactly sure how it works, but I posted the America We Stand As One video on there, and I think other people can see that now. Possibly. Kind of confusing to start off with.

I had my investments mid-term yesterday, which went decently well. I know that I was wrong on part of one question, but I felt really good about the rest of it. Plus, Gonas likes to put things on a curve, so I’m not worried. All I have left for that class now is a massive out-of-class final paper that I think he expects to be 15-20 pages. Huh.

This weekend will include a little more Reverb than normal. I’m covering a few hours today and a few extra hours tomorrow, which should be loads and loads of fun. I've decided that, between my 18 hours of class and roughly 12 hours at Reverb, I spend at least 30 hours a week just kind of suffering through waiting for the event to pass. Kind of crappy way to spend 4 and a half months, but I need the credits and I need the money, so I will suffer through.

I officially applied for graduation today, which I didn't even know I had to do until yesterday but is completely done now. Weird.

The rest of my weekend, beyond Reverbage, is pretty wide open. I'm going to catch up on season 3 of Lost, go to the UM Harvest Party, and watch Nacho Libre, among other things. If that doesn't sound fun-filled, I don't know what does.

Mountain men on the run

Not much time to post right now, I NEED to study for my Investments midterm on Thursday. I don't think this will kick my butt, but it should be pretty difficult.

Camping this weekend was great, we all had a great time. I put some pictures on flickr, but if you want to see all of them, check out the facebook album here.

I have been working on this sheet music puzzle for 10 days now. I'm probably 2/3 done. I think I'm that far anyway. While doing this, I've been listening, at least for the last few days, to my iTunes library ordered by track number, then alphabetically by album, starting at the 7's. It's a really interesting way to listen to music, I must say. Worth trying.

Now I need to go learn about mutual funds. My great victory of the weekend was finally understanding the difference between a call option and put option and how they work. It only took 2 months.

Smells like fall

Well this weekend was a very welcome respite. I saw a great movie (The Departed)and a great concert (House of Heroes/ Family Force 5 @ 12th and Porter). I proved my (and Ben's) supremacy at Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Vol. 2. I began what will be one of the most difficult puzzles of my life (intricate, four-part sheet music). I put up Christmas lights in the Nintendo fort, too.

And all that doesn't include the large amounts of nothing that I did, like watching football, surfing the net, eating Little Caesar's, etc...

Now I'm back to the grind tomorrow, but it shouldn't be too bad. Most of my classes had big things due right before break, so I don't have too much to do. Which is great, because my investments mid-term is next Thursday, and I need to start prepping for that soon.

The guys and I are going camping this weekend at Doug's house. It's gonna be cold. It's gonna be wild.

The end of an era

And, the pictures of the Nintendo Fort:

Maybe I'm crazy but...

Is anyone else mesmerized/creeped out by the two shadows dancing back and forth across the mortgage ads on the net? The girl's dreads kind of flail about, and they just dance back and forth, back and forth, with no real reason for even being there. I mean, what does dancing have to do with mortgage rates? Especially the type of dancing they do? It's just weird, and freaks me out every time I see it.

Breakage

My half-week of too much class officially ended 40 minutes ago with the completion of my principles of management mid-term (which was really easy). On the whole this past week has had a lot of assignments and tests, but it was much easier than anticipated. Lovely.

I feel like I should do something productive with this fall break. So far, my to-do list includes:
1. Buy a bed (as usual).
2. Make Funfetti cake cookies
3. Finish Ted Dekker's "Obsessed" so I can maybe think about buying the new Grisham.
4. Do the other puzzle my parents got me for my birthday.
5. Finish season 2 of Lost (2 episodes to go)
6. Catch up on season 3 with streaming episodes on abc.com
7. See FF5 (again) on Saturday
8. Enjoy the cool weather we're going to have (nothing like home, where it snowed today and temps tonight are supposed to get into the single digits)
9. Try out the bacon-wrapped pork I bought today. (it looks soooo good)

Other things I'm contemplating:
1. Writing a bad techno song with Ben.
2. Making a post card to send to postsecret.blogspot.com
3. Outlining what I would write if I wrote a book.
4. Winning every tournament on Tiger Woods for GameCube.

Does that seem like much? Oh, I want to clean the house too, since I'm going to be the only one here for long periods of time so it will be easier to get things done. Once I list it all out, I think it sounds relatively productive, I guess.

Apparently I'm going to see The Departed tomorrow a few guys. This movie looks quite good, I think it'll be a winner. And I might just go and buy "Prarie Home Companion" tomorrow too, since it's good and on sale.

If anyone has any great and wonderful ideas for me to do, I am all ears.

At the behest of my sister

Sorry Katie, I've been kind of busy lately. But I have some free time now, so here we go!

This past weekend was busy, long, and quite good. I spent Friday working on some homework and hanging out at the house. Friday night the Harrell's had all of Jess' friends over for an Italian dinner, even though she is in Italy, and it was a ton of fun. The food was great, and we got to just hang out in their backyard on the coolest night of the fall so far.

At some point, I think it might have been Thursday night, I found out there is a hole someplace in my air mattress. Suck. I WILL be buying a bed this week, mark my words.

I spent Saturday morning at Reverb, and the whole time was spent on homework, thus I didn't have time to post on here. After work I went over to the Gazebo and watched a few episodes of "Lost", which ended with one of the most ridiculous events thus far. And then Ben had to go to the Christian Showcase. I won't have time to find out what happens next until at least tomorrow night. It hurts. Pete and I went to the showcase, which was much better than Ben made it sound like it was going to be, and then I went home and went to bed early. Like 10. That was crazy.

I got up on Sunday and went to Rolling Hills, where I hung out with 3 and 4 year olds at the 9 AM service. Those kids are so much fun, it's one of my favorite parts of the week. After church my community group went out to lunch at Otters. I love the chicken strips there, and the Texas toast is great too. So great, in fact, that I bought two extra pieces after I finished my meal, and waited up front a good 15 minutes until I asked them where it was and they brought it to me. So I missed out on most of the social time, and that was unfortunate.

Last night was great! Two words: John Mayer.

Jon got free tickets to see him and Sheryl Crow at Starwood. We were pleasantly surprised, albeit confused, to see John open for Sheryl. This allowed us to get out of there with minimal traffic and at a sensible hour, since none of us really cared to see her perform. Mayer played an amazing set, he is so good on electric guitar. It's scary, really. I was mildly disappointed that he didn't play "Bold As Love", since I figured he would have rocked it so much. Alas, it was still a great show.

Although, we did end up sitting in front of four high school girls. At a John Mayer show. We knew it was a bad sign when they were playing their John Mayer ringtones for each other before the show and talking about cheerleading practice (they seriously did this, no joke). As soon as he started his set, they stood up behind us and started screaming out lyrics as loud as they could and shrieking in ecstasy anytime he dang falsetto. They also made sure to sing out extra loud any time he cursed, which was an added bonus. Needless to say, I spent the first several songs laughing hysterically at their antics. It was like having "Nashville's Best" live in your ear. Splendid indeed.

This morning I wrote a paper for business ethics that turned out much less painful than I imagined. I headed over to Showdown for an hour, which was good, and I was actually productive the entire time.

Dr. Gonas got our investments class involved in this University Stock Challenge at the Loew's Vanderbilt hotel. It was actually pretty fun, since it wasn't worth anything and my team did decently well, considering 2 of the 4 of us didn't show up, so we were at a complete disadvantage and still finished up over 100%.

Now I'm here at Reverb, finishing this up and watching The Office before I head back to the house to finish up prep for my International Business debate tomorrow and maybe even some investments homework. There is far too much happening tomorrow, I won't even get into it. Wednesday brings Showdown during the day and a management mid-term in the evening.

Then, freedom.

My fall break will be spent, most likely, doing a whole lot of nothing. I will buy a bed, and I've almost convinced myself to buy a twin instead of a full, since it's not only cheaper, but I also wouldn't have to pay them to deliver it, it could be transported in a friend's SUV. We'll see how this all shakes down.

And now, I'm out.